Mike, Mary and Fraser recently completed a 5 day course making a chair with Cretingham Crafts
Stewart taught them all aspects of making a chair without using glue or wedges. The magic of green woodworking. They learnt how to use various hand tools including drawknives, froes and spokeshaves to develop skills including cleaving, shaving, tenoning, steam bending and weaving the seats. You do not need any previous experience and all the tools are provided for you.
Fantastic chairs made by all of them and a course to be recommended, described as relaxing by some….
Creating back legs 
Sanding front legs 
Scraping the back legs 
Hard at work 
4 rails 
Fraser’s completed back 
The backs are completed. 
Steam bending the back legs 
Frame is nearly there 
Applying finishing oil 
Just the seat to go 
Chair frames completed 
Busy creating his pattern 
Who will finish first? 
How much longer….. 
Fraser’s seat is complete 
Mike & Mary’s completed chairs 
Sidney, Mary, Stewart & Mike with their completed chairs.
Last week Joy and Mary spent a couple of days on the Sudbourne Printmakers workshop developing their woodcut printing skills. A wonderful location to do a course, including a trip to the local pub at lunchtime – can’t be bad! The workshops run with 4 people creating woodblock prints and 4 people etching – 2 tutors with each group. As well as creating their prints using different methods Joy and Mary learnt about how to use the tools including sharpening them (something lots of people are wary of doing).
Marking up the Lino before cutting with the Pfeil lino tools 
Creating the block with Pfeil tools 
Crating rainbow backgrounds 
Using the press to create the print 
1 block on a background 
Creating the print 
Using the block more than once 
1 block on a background 
Using the smaller press 
First test print 
1 block on background 
2 blocks on background